All the President’s On-the-Job Training

“We have a great sense this week again of the [Obama administration] making it up as they go along, as kind of government by teenagers,” George Will said yesterday on the Fox News All-Star Panel, but actually, that’s an insult to teenagers. All of us learn by age 17 that government is a non-functioning Leviathan mess, during our first visit to the local branch of the DMV, as Charles Krauthammer writes in his latest column. All of us, that is, except the president.

Krauthammer notes that at age 52, Mr. Obama has made a breakthrough discovery: “We have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly,” he told Chris Matthews during his recent vanity interview with NBC. As Krauthammer responsd, that’s a rather “interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.”

Read the whole thing, which outlines the repeated examples of this curious admission from the president, uttered in various forms after each of his Keynesian-based crony socialist programs either explodes on the launching pad, or fails to achieve flight:

The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. The sweep and scope of his health-care legislation alone are unprecedented. He’s spent billions of tax dollars attempting to create, by fiat and ex nihilo, a new green economy. His (failed) cap-and-trade bill would have given him regulatory control of the energy economy. He wants universal preschool and has just announced his unwavering commitment to slaying the dragon of economic inequality, which, like the poor, has always been with us.

Obama’s discovery that government bureaucracies don’t do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself. How does his Olympian vision coexist with the lassitude of his actual governance, a passivity that verges on absenteeism?

What bridges that gap is rhetoric. Barack Obama is a master rhetorician. It’s allowed him to move crowds, rise inexorably, and twice win the most glittering prize of all. Rhetoric has changed his reality. For Obama, it can change the country’s. Hope and change, after all, is a rhetorical device. Of the kind Obama has always imagined can move mountains.

That’s why his reaction to the Obamacare website’s crash-on-takeoff is so telling. His remedy? A cross-country campaign-style speaking tour. As if rhetoric could repeal that reality.

And speaking of the R-Word, “The Left’s Reality Problem” is explored by Rich Lowry of National Review, in the otherwise-leftwing and usually unreality-based Politico:

The “reality-based community” isn’t what it used to be. Progressives spent much of the George W. Bush years deriding the right for disdaining reality itself and waging an associated “war on science,” such was its purported hostility to evidence. The meme arose from a high-handed blind quote from a Bush senior adviser to journalist Ron Suskind; the adviser said that people in the “reality-based community” underestimated how the United States could alter the state of things through the exercise of its power.

The left happily adopted the appellation “reality-based community.” (You can still find T-shirts and bumper stickers online.) It congratulated itself on its factual rigor and nominated for president a man whose initial appeal was based, in part, on his exquisite sense of nuance. Message: We’re more empirically grounded and intellectually supple than you.

The erstwhile reality-based community is having a tough time of it lately, though. Most infamously, Obamacare is foundering on the flagrant deceptions used to sell it, exposed every day by the workings of the law in reality.

Many liberals still don’t want to acknowledge the rather straightforward fact that if you mandate more insurance benefits in the so-called Affordable Care Act, insurance will cost more. QED. You might be able to cushion the cost increase for some people with subsidies, but not for everyone, and the underlying insurance is still more—not less—expensive.

One of the aspects that makes Obamacare unique is its destructive speed. It took decades for the notion that FDR’s Social Security was an insolvent Ponzi scheme to reach fruition. LBJ passed his Great Society programs in the mid-’60s; it took about two decades before President Reagan could accurately point out, “In the sixties we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won.” If you’ve never seen the 1958 film, A Night to Remember, you’ll be amazed at how glacially (if you’ll pardon the pun) the disaster unfolds. Initially, only a handful of crewmen are aware that the Titanic has scraped an iceberg. Then they fetch the captain. Who then calls for the ship’s designer, who’s also onboard, for confirmation. Compared to the modern disaster movie, it’s an agonizingly long time before the ship is perched at a 45 degree angle and about to slide into the Atlantic. In contrast, Obamacare is like the bomb onboard the 707 in the first Airport movie, made a decade later: It’s exploded with such a bang, everybody knows the plane will quickly auger into the ground unless drastic measures are taken by Dean Martin and the rest of the crew.

Reagan tried. He also had a Democratic House and Senate the whole time he was in office. And in those days, the Mainstream Media was the only media source. He had a lot of opposition to work against. He wasn't perfect, he did some stupid things, but he was better than everyone since then.

Behind the Choom Door, the bong-a-thon dorm room postulates how to "cure" all the "ills" of a world in which reality is suspended. It all sounds so profound to ears attuned to a frequency beamed from an Ivy Tower.

Allowing the Dorm Room circle to implement their hallucinations by giving them keys to the vault and power over the levers of our to governance is an act of insanity tinged with a suicidal thrill ride risk.

And worse, WE continue...inexplicably...to call the hallucinators..."progressives". That is as stunning to me as it is jarring.

THEY are not any such thing. Leftism is NOT liberalism. It is a mask worn to allow second story men into the vault. And WE constantly,...stupefied and dim...when the mask slips, WE put it on a little tighter, arrange it to hide the face behind it more effectively.

We enter the hallucination by unwittingly participating in it.

Of course the "profound" and "brilliant" plots and schemes don't work. They are built on a foundation of angel dust and false promises. Just because those tripping the light fandango BELIEVE the hallucinatory "gifts" they bring to the world are precious and profound...doesn't mean WE should adopt the Choom lingo to describe the inane process.

But we do. We give them a perfect place to hide. In plain sight.

Lawless, reckless, angry and seeking punishment, payback and retribution for imagined slights...they are marauding through neighborhoods breaking things in a fit of rage, thinly veiled and barely suppressed. But careful to don the mask.

The intent is hidden still, as the "chosen" awake to find that their neighborhoods were not spared.

"Why us? We're the liberals and progressives you've been waiting for!", they cry.

Why yes, yes you are. And the mask slips even more. But fear not...WE will be there to help put it firmly back in place.

Kyle Smith talks about Obama's incredible hubris and narcissism in his new article at the 'New York Post' on his infamous "selfie" moment at Mandela's funeral, in which he writes, "Obama is, despite all the 'we' talk, as much of a loner as Al Gore or Richard Nixon, and yet he wishes he were even more alone still — 'the emperor' in his palace who never has to come out and ask John Boehner’s permission for anything.

"Those pictures of him in Rosa Parks’ seat, in front of the JFK picture — he’s all alone."

Just as each and every discipline of science looks to the other for the proof of evolution their atheism demands the great 0 believed his fellow beyond liberal travelers capable of accomplishing the dreams they all assumed. From top to bottom accomplishment means nothing, background nothing, training nothing, only ideology is required for inclusion in his employ. This is the true parallel with academia, the reason neither discipline vetted Warren.

Annnnnnd.....how many of those "thousands of writers, opera singers, music teachers, photographers, doctors, lawyers" are ever going to jump ship and vote for a Tea Party Conservative?

What percentage of them have ever voted for a "republican" of ANY stripe, not even a RINO like Bloomberg?

Great, some of those smarmy elitists are finally getting a dose of reality...Problem is, will have only one net effect on the Body Politic...

These people will DOUBLE-DOWN on their commitment to The General Left, to the democrats, to their glittering ideal of what "should" be, regardless of any contradictory information they see with their own eyes or pockebooks..

They will do so, they MUST do so, in order to "prevent" that ghastly "right wing" (who engineered this whole failure after all, right?) from exploiting this tragedy, and taking us "backward" after such a long and noble fight...they have seized the Beachhead at heavy cost, casualties are horrific, but they cannot quit NOW...Not when a Single Payer, fully subsidized, Government Controlled Health Care with Omniscient Central Planning is the "next logical step" of their Crusade.

Because THATS what should have been done in the first place, and every "writer, opera singer, music teacher, photographer, doctor, lawyer" in every Tony Urban Enclave KNOWS that.

Comrade Obama is just the most graphic exemplar of something that has been going on since the late-'50s, early '60s. Somewhere in there it was determined that to be successful, you had to go to college. Also somewhere in there it was determined that if you did go to college, you were definitionally successful.

Beginning somewhere in there, the guy who owned the company or who invented the product, was no longer in charge, some punk just out of college with an MBA was the new CEO Somewhere in there, you could go straight from college to a mid-level position in government, the non-profits, some professions, the media, and entertainment and make a really good living and have people listen to you, even care what you thought. Somewhere in there some people became members of protected classes and they got to take that college rocket to stardom even if they were so dumb they couldn't pour pee out of a boot.

The reason this looks like government by teenagers is because it IS government by teenagers! None of these people have done a thing in their lives that was even objectively graded and there was never any consequence for failure. How in Hell do you grade a community organizer's performance? How in Hell do you grade a back bench state senator's performance. He had a credential that we can be certain he didn't do a damned thing to earn beyond being born caramel-colored and with good Red connections. He's surrounded with Red-diaper babies, affirmative action hires, and perpetual teenagers who went from college to the jobs that college will get you even if you can't pour pee out of a boot with the instructions on the heel.

Unlike a teenage at the DMV, Obama is in charge of these various government agencies which supposedly bungled his signature plan, just as he is capable of firing the secretaries and undersecretaries who allegedly let him down.

Obama is sadly the latest and greatest living example of the Peter Principle: he has failed upward into the most powerful job in the US, if not the world, when it was evident that his modest talents were strained by sitting rather inattentively in the Illinois state senate.

No one should listen to what President Obama says, and take it at face value. He doesn't mean any of what he says. He's just talking, to talk, to appear competent, to appear that he understands the problems and knows how to fix them. None of which is reality or true.He is, however, truthfully engaged in a massive redistribution of wealth. That wealth, however, is not going to the poor and needy. It is going to Democrat supporters and cronies, who in turn are donating that taxpayer money back to the Democrat Party. Quite a scheme.

Big difference between on-the-job training and what Obama is doing. When you train on the job, you learn things, possibly make mistakes, try not to repeat them, and you most likely get fired if you continually make mistakes, particularly if they cost your employer money.Obama is doing nothing like that. His 'mistakes' cost him nothing, the non-Fox media cover for him, and he continues on the same path. His intent is not to learn from mistakes, but to dismantle these United States, its Constitution, laws, economy, and positive foreign relations with our allies.

The only problem I have with this article is the implicit suggestion that with Obozo's new-found "discovery" about the ineptness of govt bureaucracy, Obozo has somehow "learned" something. If someone has, indeed, learned something, then he would change course, apply remedies, make amends. Obozo has learned nothing -- in fact, he has vowed to keep and defend ObozoCare for as long as he is in office. I suspect his motive for this latest admission is to 1) pass the buck, take zero responsibility for his failure, and 2) have the bamboozled dim-wits feel sorry for him. Then he'll proceed, full steam ahead, in ramming socialized medicine down the throats of Americans.

As Theodore Dalrymple stated, I do wish you all would all blaming poor ol' Keynes for this. Keynes thought that during certain fiscal emergencies government programs should use some deficit spending, until the economy gets back on its feet. He never imagined the idea of deficit spending as a permanent feature, for political purposes, year after year for what is now almost a lifetime.

I don't know why everyone is so surprised, including Krauthammer. The man said we were 5 days away from fundamentally transforming the United States Of America while campaigning in 2008. He and most of his people have never had a real job, ever. They are fundamentally transforming and the supposed opposition party is feckless, other than a few who are summarily dismissed by the leadership types as "outliers". The necessary information was all there in 2008 and especially in 2012, but the republican wizards of smart ran mush candidates who could easily be dismissed by the voters both times. Most voters, when confronted with a choice between a pretend Santa Claus and the real McCoy, will always vote for the real McCoy.